The NEW home of the OH SO PRETTY Hillbilly Mom, nestled in the heart of DoNotLand, where the Gummi Mary appeared on a plate of melted Gummi Bears and was unceremoniously half-devoured by a DoNot, and dumped in the wastebasket. The excitement of that day was rivaled only by the New Year's Day trip to Save-A-Lot, where a woman followed Mrs. Hillbilly Mom, stroked her arm, asked if she was married, and declared, "You are SO PRETTY."

Monday, August 3, 2009

The Brown Table Graveyard

The boys and I spent half the day at Newmentia, putting my books in number order, putting shelves back on the bookcase that the custodians broke and then repaired this summer, plugging in the microwave and mini-fridge (and filling it with soda and water), stocking a file cabinet drawer with kid snacks, rearranging my classroom so the swine flu isn't sneezed ON me, but at right angles to me, and letting the tech dude plug in my new school laptop. Oh, the new school laptop which refused to connect to the wireless signal so I can use my SmartBoard as a SmartBoard and not a glorified movie screen. I guess that doesn't really matter, since Tech Dude took my entire projector cart with him when he left. He said he'd be back to deal with the laptop.

I refuse to let the boys buy snacks and soda out of the machine after school this year. Times are tough. I'm not forking over a couple of bucks apiece, five times a week. They will eat broughten snacks, or they will go hungry.

My new classroom design will lesson my boredom for the first quarter. So what if my kids are crammed in like sardines? It's all about MY comfort, not theirs. Mmm...sardines. Since when did the sardines start looking like regular fish instead of minnows? I swear, when I was a kid, you got like four little sardines in a can, and now it's just two chunks of sardine, without really having a neck and tail area, but more like two main bodies with the heads and tails hacked off. You can't even tell which end is head and which end is tail. I hope you all enjoy sardines as much as I do. Only in mustard sauce. The others are nasty, not that I ever tried them, but who wants fish in tomato sauce? Not me, that's for sure. Now where was I...

I really want to get rid of a table in my classroom. It is big and has a fake wood top and has four legs (DUH!) that don't fold up. Mabel turned it down. I will beg unsuspecting cronies next week to adopt my orphan table. I'll have to throw a little Tom Sawyer spin on it. "I don't know what I'd do without my big brown table. It really fills up that corner of my room. It prevents me from having to hang anything on the walls, because you can't get close enough to read my world map, and when stuff falls off, you can't get back behind Old Brown to re-hang it. And it sags just right in the middle. It's like a magnet for dust. I'm surprised you don't have one. I guess they just let us Master Teachers have them. It's really good for kids who break into your room over the weekend when they're having a lock-in to hide under and pull Science Fair display boards around the sides. You can always find the dried-up spitwads that miss their target when a sub is here. And a lot of times, you can get some gum wrappers if you're inclined to make those chain thingies. But there I go, braggin' about my stuff. I'm surprised nobody took it during the summer, after the custodians turned it sideways to get it out the door and plopped it in the hall for a couple days. I sure hope it doesn't disappear. I don't remember if I put my name on it in an inconspicuous place. I wouldn't want anything to happen to it. I think I saw one on Antiques Roadshow one time. Gotta go now, and polish my table." Funny how it seemed like a good idea when the Fingernator offered me this table the year before she retired. Let that illustrate how long she had tried to unload it.

I am not optimistic. My room is where junk furniture goes, to live for eternity.

2 comments:

I had acquired quite a few many desirable pieces of furniture, paid for out of my very own teacher (okay, pharmacist) money. I left it there when I quit. Part of me felt that it was just wrong to quit in the middle of the year, leaving them with a newly-licensed, totally inexperienced, and mostly incompetent replacement AND to haul off everything she'd been using in the classroom. I left a computer cart, two comfy chairs, a book shelf, lots of books, all my supplies-- staplers, etc., and even a set of about 30 wipey boards. Everything. In fact, the only thing I went back for was a MLK poster that I really like and my mini fridge. I told them to pass my stuff on to the new English teacher this year, but I'm sure it is all being parted out between the old teachers as we speak.

I had an unwanted table once, and I was able to get a custodian to haul it away for me. He put it in the teacher's lounge that's not really a teacher's lounge but more like an un-air-conditioned boneyard for unwanted tables and broken computers that can't be thrown away because they're school property. Nobody even knows where they are, but one of these days someone will surely come through with an inventory sheet and if those broken items aren't there, they'll accuse someone of stealing them.

Miss Ann,Only yesterday, the Tech Dude carted that computer out of my room that hasn't worked since February. I don't really think he plans to fix it. He was shocked that I wanted to keep the keyboard and mouse to use with my school laptop. I guess that's like hooking up a horse to pull your Mustang. BUT...I want that number pad to enter grades. I'm not going to allow my new laptop technology to slow down my well-oiled teaching routine. I am set in my ways, and don't want to learn any new computer tricks.